2009-08-30

Often, after a fresh new installation of FreeBSD, we have a set of programs we want to install. The conventional method would be installing it one by one in /usr/ports. Today, we will use meta ports to install the set of applications by just one "make install clean" rather then "cd" into individual directories and do "make install clean" for every ports.

Meta ports are, as the name implies, ports file that describe about the program we are installing. The ports file describe where & what to install for this ports to work. A sample of "where" would be "where to download the source", "where to install it" and so on. As for "what", it would be "what to install to fulfill the dependencies". In this post, we will take advantage of this "what". We will define the dependencies as the list of programs we want to install so that the ports will install it.

2009-08-18

When using an insecure internet connection (e.g. wireless), it is a good practice to tunnel internet traffic through ssh. Tunneling through ssh provide encryption of the traffic starting from local computer to the point ends where ssh server is. It is especially important to encrypt the traffic out of the local PC when using un-secure connection as other malicious intent users might be able to sniff packet off the current connection.

2009-08-15

SmokePing is an utility to keep track of the network latency from your network to various site. Its output are recorded in graph, for analysis purpose. Its configuration are simple and easy to setup. But some times, logging are needed to debug some probes failed to output to graph. The logging setup will need to edit some files to make sure it rotate itself and syslog needs to be notified.

WordPress plugin wp-cache is a plugin that caches the WordPress post the first time when someone visits it then it uses the cache next time when the same post needs to load again. This saves processing power and also improves user experience as WordPress posts are loaded faster.

For some reason, wp-cache stop working. The "Cache contents" in WP-Cache Manager (accessible from Settings --> WP-Cache) shows both "cached pages" and "expired pages" are "0" (zero) all the time.